On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 18:20:02 GMT, Robert Komar <robk@robpc2.home.org>
wrote:


>A pair of brackets denotes a range of characters to be used in the search.
>Adding a circumflex "^" at the start of the range means to invert the logic,
>so everything except the following range. So, "[^\"] means any character
>other than \" (where the " is quoted to avoid confusing the command-line
>shell). Adding the "*" immediately after means any number of the preceding
>characters, including zero of them.
>
>Outside of the brackets, "^" means the start of the line. "$" means the
>end of the line.
>
>
>^ [^\"]* \" [^\"]* $
>
>start some number 1 " some number end
>of of not-" of not-" of
>line characters characters line
>
>
>So only a single " somewhere on the line will return a match. The 3 or more
>" regexp is only a little more complicated than that.
>
>I don't know a good on-line reference for regular expressions, but I'm sure
>google will turn something up. I learned about them in Sobell's book "A
>Practical Guide to the Unix System", and in an earlier edition of O'Reilly's
>camel book on Perl. There's a nice overview in Kernighan and Pike's book
>"The Unix Programming Environment", and I seem to recall that the small
>book on awk and sed programming had a section on regular expressions, as
>well. They are common and confusing enough that they have been covered
>in a lot of books on Unix.
>
>Cheers,
>Rob Komar

Rob,

Thank you SO MUCH!!

I have the Sobell book but I never thought to look for regex there.

buck